Tuesday’s WV Republican primary was unprecedented in a number of ways, especially the amount of outside money the carpetbagging governor “Jersey Pat” Morrisey brought in to put his thumbs on as many scales as he could. Pat is not particularly popular in the state, to the point where a Republican state legislator introduced a bill requiring all future WV governors to have been born in the state.
Now some of Jersey Pat’s favored candidates—the sad sacks who are eager to sell every last resource WV has to fulfill the agenda of out-of-state millionaires—did win on Tuesday, and other went down to defeat. Pat, who lies all the time, tried to spin it this way:
Here’s a soupcon of factchecking: about half of those candidates ran uncontested, so Pat had nothing to do with their victories. And others didn’t receive money from his out-of-state millionaire buddies.
Pat’s Koch brothers-paid buddies took a victory lap too:
This is prime doubleplusgood talk because here “grassroots” means “spending millions of dollars from out of state donors to shady PACs”. You can’t make this stuff up. This same group bragged about hiring a bunch of temporary workers to canvass neighborhoods and then also said that they were proof of grassroots support for the Koch agenda. Words, what do they mean?
The GOP primary was heated because Pat is hellbent on doing things like destroying WV’s excellent child vaccination record, sending state taxpayer money to out-of-state private schools, and putting data centers everywhere and then keeping the money for his cronies in Charleston. And I’m happy to say that the state legislator pushing that lopsided and unfair data center profit distribution lost his primary on Tuesday. And he lost by 2 votes, so please please please vote in November.
But the most unseemly thing that happened after Tuesday’s election was this:
Not only is it completely inappropriate, it calls back to the violence on the part of the WV GOP in recent times:
–Derrick Evans participated in the Jan 6 insurrection just a few days after being sworn into the WV legislature.
–In 2024 Joseph De Soto threatened to kill Democratic members of the WV legislature shortly before he was sworn in. I wrote about his troubling background before that election
And now there is this shameful behavior from Coop-Gonzalez, which the governor has yet to condemn. WTF is going on in the WV GOP?
I’ll leave you with this:
